Easy Art for Kids – Painting on Foil

Posted on August 30, 2011

We haven’t had our painting easel out for a long time. It takes up a lot of space, and we don’t have much of that at the moment. But Morgan was keen to do ‘something special’… ‘not just boring old painting’ so I dragged the easel in and surprised him by setting up something really special!

Ok, so it’s not that special, just some regular old aluminium foil to paint on instead of paper. But it’s shiny and shimmery and you can see a very hazy reflection of yourself in the foil while you paint which feels rather magical.

The foil is a little delicate and can rip and tear easily which can be frustrating. It is also light and moves around a lot if laid loosely on a flat surface which is also frustrating. So if you don’t have easel to attach your foil to, try taping it to a table or large piece of cardboard for some support.

It also helps to add a small amount of dish washing liquid to your paint mix. Not only will that make cleaning up easier but it also helps the paint to stick to the foil better and not flake off when it dries.

Read the comments or scroll down to add your own:

I think that looks fabulous! All kids are going to think this is a special painting activity. The bright colours look fabulous against the alfoil. I just love your boy’s art apron too by the way :-)

katefsays

my mum made the apron (we have several) from this free pattern at Sew Liberatedhttp://sewliberated.com/free-tutorials
It’s a fab apron because even little kids can get them on and off on their own and not that tricky to sew either.

Thanks for the dish washing tip – our paint always seems to flake off the foil once it drys!

katefsays

sometimes it can depend on the type of paint too. I’ve found that powder paints flake a lot, even with some detergent added (though that does help). We use liquitemp and it seems to stay on quite well, even with folding.

This is SPECIAL! H e looks very happy. I wonder if adding glue to paint would help with it not cracking. We just did this at school to adhere paint better ot the foam egg cartons (we made dragons for Chinese New Year) IN that case we did almost 2 parts glue to one part paint. It worked famously. Love your paintings and cant wait to try it. Perhaps I will look for the heavy duty foil, see how that works out for the ripping issues. Awesome idea, thanks.

What kind of paint do you used por this project? Acrylic? Because I would love to try it with my kids

katefsays

We just use regular kids liquid tempera paint… just add a dash of dish washing detergent and it will help the paint stick to the foil.

Sharysays

Great idea. I thought that wrapping the foil over cardboard squares before they paint would maker a nice presentation of the artwork. Also, it might keep it secure while they are painting. I will try this next week.

mariyamsays

NICE!

Trackbacks

[…] He went straight to work and mixed colour after colour creating his masterpiece! Once finished I asked him if he would like to try painting on tinfoil, of course he said yes! I found this idea on line here. […]

[…] My craft for this week was foil painting, which I thought was enchanted mirror-adjacent, and mostly thought it would be fun for kids to paint on something other than paper for a change. Hoooooly moly, I was right, they had SO much fun with this. Here is where I picked the idea up from. […]